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Currently in development: Faroes4XPlane, my second payware scenery package, will feature the landscape, the airport and helipads of the Faroe Islands. Read more…

Svalbard4XPlane, my first payware scenery package for X-Plane is now available. It was developed in cooperation with Stairport Sceneries and covers the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard in the Arctic ocean. Read more…

My dear friend Nino is continuously working on his catalog containing information about Antarctica, particularly Research Bases, Airfields and other points of interest. Read more…

What the mesh edit tool is able to do, is already remarkable: Exchange (entirely or partially) of the in a DSF encoded elevation model (encoded in a way, that supports a sub-meter vertical resolution); the new elevation model can be optionally pre-processed, e.g. smoothing or flattening specific areas (to realize accurately sloped runways and aprons or e.g. leveled parking spots); automatic or manual refinement of the triangulated irregular network, so that the resulting terrain mesh well represents the underlying elevation model; option to add additional constraints referencing terrain definitions (e.g. to add missing waterbodies, refine coastlines or to add ortho-photos); patching the triangulated irregular network with mesh objects, modeled in 3D applications.

Unfortunately, the development has now reached a point, where the assistance of Laminar Research is urgently needed. As stated with the beginning of the project, I don’t want to offer just another tool in the series of VertexTool, RasterTool and MeshRemexe. The primary goal is, that mesh patching doesn’t longer require the re-distribution of entire X-Plane tiles, because this proceed comes with a lot of implications.

In my opinion we need: An official mesh patch specification (file format specification), a common repository to share mesh patches (something like the scenery gateway) and a procedure to patch meshes automatically (on the fly, during the startup of the simulator, or whilst running the updater). In addition, there are also some requirements which would demand an extension or at least adjustments of the existing DSF format (more about that in another posting).

I have already had some interesting discussions with other X-Plane mesh specialists, which, however, did not lead to any concrete results so far. Also, we couldn’t gain the attention of Laminar Research. If you like to contribute in any way or join the discussion with your experiences in scenery development and in conjunction with mesh editing, I would like to invite you to the dedicated forum thread at x-plane.org.